A program that separates these out of that config file/representation/whatever this is (idk what Okta is tbh) into individual substrings is really easy

I actually wrote a regex that matches each username in that structure for fun lol: (?<=[\[| ])[a-zA-Z0-9_]+ but you can match regex with regex too (It's long as hell though, relatively)

You can try it in your browser at: https://regex101.com/

Idk why they called that field .*regex though, probably cuz it's fake

Wait I can write a better regex lol

Edit: this will match all substrings properly inside that structure, including more regexes, correctly(edit edit: WRONG!): (?<=[\[| ])[^,]+(?=[,|\]])

Edit edit: It's all fucked and my brain hurts now because I wanted to match any valid regex inside of that structure, separately

I will be back with the ultimate regex later, probably recursive and with the caveat that if you want to use comma literals, you will have to escape them, call that shit X-regex (special X.com regex syntax)

I am going to bed I am so tired

I'm sorry, there's no way I can write this in a sane-sounding way, it's been a journey and I'm probably drastically overcomplicating this

Hi, idk if you saw my other reply, but I have returned with the promised regular expression capable of doing this (at least when parsed by PCRE and similar)

(?<=(?<!\\)\[|(?<!\\), ).*?(?=(?<!\\)]|(?<!\\),)

It will match each username/regex matching usernames as an individual substring

In the end I didn't need recursion and managed to accomplish the task by using nested lookarounds and making the assumption that brackets and commas are escaped with backslashes. It could probably be further simplified by using subroutines that some regex parsers are capable of using. Also it is most likely possible to write a regex that doesn't require escaping brackets, besides when you need to escape brackets when writing regexes anyway ofc. The requirement that commas be escaped is analogous to requiring that quotes be escaped inside a string literal if instead the usernames/regexes that match usernames were enclosed in quotes

I uhhhh don't write many regexes

There's probably something to be said about this task being easier to accomplish in languages "more powerful" (in terms: "Chomsky hierarchy") than regular languages but I'm not (-free languages, etc )

I have a tendency toward owning myself, if you find a way to break my regex without breaking the assumptions specified above I will be further owned